my mother is gone. no longercan i call her on the phone, hear the smilein her voice. i sit in the darkthousands of years away from that momentand picture home. watching the waves & thewild of the sea quietens me, in my mindsomething stills, just for a momentthe anxiety stops. the thoughts never stop.my mind is never silent, turning over the strangest things, thoughts flip.

glass is really a liquid. i used to stare atwindows in between sentence & fixate, on this.glass is molecules. it exists in the space betweenwater, and structured reality. it is amorphous,like our bodies. it will warp, but can bend more than usbefore it breaks. eventually everything shatters.

once i broke down. i was absent, missingvocal sound. i have thought & thoughtabout where i went that year. i have no answer.

walls are still, but they hear & seeeverything we do. i drop food on the floor,see particles in my mind decomposing. breaking down,pulling away, radiating outwardstowards the point of absorption. rotting skin, ants,worms, writhing maggots move all around. i feel them crawlspreading over me.

i can’t stand to be. here, anymore.my brain is malfunctioning. decomposingfrom the second we are born, we are withering.dying from the insiderotting out, like my mother.i close my eyes. she speaks to me. she is gone. she is gone. she is gone. the reality of her absent form repeats,she sits beside me.

love has been an unexpected found, lost for me before i dared to open the hands that clenched, trying to contain. bloomed confusion obscured inside the shadowed hurt of childhood. before i unlocked the door to inner self, found you outwith.

love has been the cold reflective, steel blade. understanding, giving. unforgiving. the release of who i am, my path back to you.

the path to emotions shuttered room, where i pray on tired knee. beg to die, beg to live, to come alive. to feel renewal inside, energies light, birthing the summer sun.

the fight, to barter with emotion. life’s metronome unbalanced. the constant flux. the unexpected found, the unsound. the fight within, to understand the eternal source, that drags me down to the drowning pool.

voices come to me unannounced i
answer them. they offer unfinished
questions. i have incompletes to give
spoken, in the language of broken.
mouth sounds, garbled out sync
from a time before, the out spark misfire.
they hover near my face, sometimes they
bark, i am the one begging. they slide into
me as i become. disappear at my bidding
back into the porous wall, the white noise sleep,
the shutter, curtain to the overwhelm,
offered up from the land of never born. i sink.
i am the stone, recumbent
under ice river, white numb bone.
the water goddess ice shelf
washes over me.
i drift to sea. no dreams live underwater.
blanc nothing, buoyant in loss. i am
absent. existence ebbs & flows
inside the undertow i was born into, that keeps me
down. i kick, twitch to surface spitting.
lashed incomplete, inside confusion.
drying out, thawing, i will remember who i was,
next,
time.